


no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear

by deathrae



Series: i've been through hell but i'm still standing [7]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: GUYS FOR REAL I'M NOT SCREWING AROUND ON THIS ONE, Gen, I think?, Self-Harm, THIS ONE IS ROUGH, exploration of trauma, i think at least, ptsd study, survivor's guilt, you guys can be the judges
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 04:29:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8734933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathrae/pseuds/deathrae
Summary: Because sometimes teenagers die.And sometimes they come back.





	

Lea was a free spirit. That is to say, he was one trackbound penny away from a proper trainwreck, all fire and smoke, screeching brakes and warping metal. He was a rampaging inferno in a body made of dry kindling, ready to flare at the slightest spark.

It was not in his nature to _settle_.

Traverse Town was, by its very nature, simultaneously transient and everlasting. It was the eternal eye of a hurricane, always on the verge of blowing apart and yet sturdier than a steel bunker, unassailable and unbreakable. It was where even the most flighty settled, by virtue of demand rather than preference. You did not _go_ to Traverse Town, it was simply where you _wound up_ in the end.

It was the only place Lea could think to be. Twilight Town was full of ghosts washed red in the light of sunset. The Castle that Never Was, well, Wasn’t. And the fledgling phoenix that was Radiant Garden had its own spectres. Ansem’s castle cast long shadows Lea didn’t fancy standing in just yet.

And thus, he had _wound up_ in Traverse Town. He was just another piece of human driftwood, bleached white by death and rebirth, washing up on the shores of a world that wasn’t a _world_ at all, just a floating pile of flotsam and jetsam swirling the tub drain of the multiverse.

His apartment in District Two was too small, but not in the sense that he knocked into shelves or hit his head on doorframes, though both these things happened, and frequently. It was that the apartment wasn’t enough to hold him. It was a cobbled-together box struggling to contain a soul too old and battered and combustible as his, fraying at the corners and bursting at the edges. The walls were flimsy and prone to creaking in a high wind and the pipes groaned like the dead whenever anyone in the building cranked open a faucet.

He counted the days between visits to the grand castle in the Land that Had Once Been Castle Oblivion (he still didn’t quite understand that one) and ticked them off on a grubby calendar he’d scrounged from someone’s trash can at the end of the prior year. Now he traced a finger over the scribbled-out numbers and mentally tallied how long he’d been here. It wasn’t accurate to say that he was _living_ in this apartment. More just... clawing his way through time, passive and apathetic.

There were things he should be doing. Leaks in the ceiling he could fix. Holes in the curtains he should mend. Cracked panes of glass in his bedroom that let the cold inside in winter and bugs in summer.

Instead, he was sitting in his living room—did it make it a den if it didn’t have windows?—in the dark and cold of autumn, with his keyblade across his knees.

He didn’t fear attack in a real, tangible way. The Heartless were suppressed, for now—tamped down by a final defeat, locked into the Realm of Darkness once and for all. For once, the Doors were shut without any of theirs trapped on the other side. There were no plans for rescue efforts, no need to crack open a window to let Light out and risk Darkness sneaking out like shadow and smoke again.

But he sat in the dark and watched his apartment’s front door, weapon in his lap, magic on the tip of his tongue, waiting for an attack that never came. His stomach rumbled, and he heated soup in his grimy, tiny kitchen. The stove had long since given up the ghost, so he held the pot over his open palm and a nugget of flickering flame.

He ticked another box on his calendar.

He dreamt of fire.

Not his own, not the kind that was fun and vibrant and warm. Not the kind that burned hot in his blood, that coursed through his soul. Not the kind that had been the first thing to answer him when he wept and screamed in pain and impotent rage as his soul was ripped apart. That had surged and crystallized into giant wheels of steel and nitroglycerin when howled vengeance filled the empty hole in his chest after his heart had been torn away and hidden somewhere.

No, this fire was choking smoke and fever sweat, stove-hot. Aching and suffocating, melting plastic and smoldering wood, his skin bubbling and turning angry, hideous red when it got close.

Within the confines of the dream—the nightmare—he woke up in his bed to the nearby sound of popping wood and the sporadic clunks of pieces of furniture giving way and collapsing to the floor. His sheets were melting, liquefying around him, and his whole body hurt, every nerve screeching. He was on fire, he was _on fire_ , and when he struggled out of bed the superheated floor scalded the soles of his feet in fractions of seconds. The stench of burnt hair and flesh was choking his nose. Or was that the smoke?

The staccato _tap-tap_ knock on his front door made him jolt. He’d fallen asleep in his chair again. When he jerked to his feet his neck creaked audibly. God, he _ached_. He cursed under his breath, rubbing the back of his neck, where his hair had finally tripped over the line between _roguishly messy_ and _when’s the last time you had a haircut_. He tried to push away thoughts of heat and fire. He tried to push down the nagging feeling that the dream wasn’t a dream but a memory, memory of lying on the ground, burning, burning, _dying_.

The knock came again and he crept to the door, listening to the shuffling of hands in pockets on the other side. He slid the chain back and turned the lock. Physical gestures that were more for potential enterprising burglars and his own crumbling peace of mind—it wasn’t as if they would do anything against the forces of Darkness.

Lea pulled the door open an inch, then several more.

On the other side was Ventus. His messy blonde hair was sticking out every which way, but it belonged to a happier, long-ago normalcy that didn’t reach Ven’s face. His bright eyes were dimmed with tension, his grin absent, replaced by a shoddy stand-in that seemed to mistakenly think that “distracted frown” was Ven’s resting expression.

Lea became very suddenly aware that he hadn’t said anything in so long his voice would grate and growl inappropriately if he so much as grunted. He nodded in greeting.

“Hey,” Ven said. His eyes didn’t flick down to Lea’s bared weapon, but he knew Ven saw it. “Can I come in?”

Lea shrugged one shoulder and stepped back, opening the door wider as he went so that Ven could slip inside.

He looked around the room as Ven entered and scanned the walls and floor, and Lea saw it suddenly as Ven would. The walls were bare, the floor cleared of junk so he wouldn't trip over something in a fight. There were no trinkets on Axel’s sparse furniture, no mementos hanging from hooks or nailed to the plaster and drywall. It was an apartment for a ghost, nondescript and utterly unindicative of who he had once been.

From the back, Ven looked almost like...

Lea cleared his throat and dismissed his keyblade. “So,” Lea said after an uncomfortably long moment in which Ven took in the small room and then turned to face him.

“Hm?” Ven said, patient, like he didn’t have his own conversation starter.

Lea scratched at the back of his neck. His joints ached and complained with every movement.

“D’you need me for something?”

Ven watched him for a moment. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I think maybe I do.”

Power and fear and something that might have been glee flooded Lea’s stomach and skipped his heart like a stone across a pond. “Yeah?” The thought of being needed, of another battle to fight, made his sluggish blood move. “What’s going on?”

Ven sucked on his front teeth, thinking. He looked like he had been on the verge of saying something and then thought better of it.

“I want you to come live in the castle,” he said.

Lea weighed paranoia against faith. “What? Why?”

“Base of operations,” Ven said. “It’s too hard to reach you here.”

Lea looked around his dingy apartment. Ven’s shoulders were firm, a tension thrumming across his nerves like he was prepping himself for an argument.

Lea wasn’t sure how he knew that Ven was lying. There was a tremble in his lip, a flightiness to his eye whenever Lea tried to catch Ven’s. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was the fact that his boots and clothes seemed untouched, clean, freshly pressed as if Aqua had coerced him into ironing everything before he left the castle. Maybe it was something else.

But it was Ven. And Ven wouldn’t lie without good reason. That much, at least, Lea still trusted.

“Alright,” Lea said, slow, like he was thinking about it. Ven blinked, tension leeching out of him. That definitely wasn’t the answer he was expecting. “Sure.”

“Really?” Ven asked, eagerness and relief fighting for dominance in his voice, in the way his eyes suddenly lit up proper Ventus blue, his smile wide and white and back to the way it was supposed to be. “You’ll come with me?”

“So long as you quit trying to weasel me into going,” Lea said, and shot Ven a wry grin.

“What? I’m not trying to—”

Lea laughed, and the sound surprised Lea more than it surprised Ven. “You wouldn’t be here by yourself if there was real trouble. More likely, it’d be Riku. Eh. Master Riku. Maybe Sora, if shit was _really_ going down.” Ven flushed a little, and Lea continued with a grin, tucking his hands into his pockets. “I figure, you’re here because everybody knows we’ve been friends longest, and you’ve got the best chances of convincing me.”

Ven grinned. “Yeah, okay. But you don’t get to sass me about it, you know why?”

Lea raised an eyebrow. “Hm?”

“Because it still _worked_.”

 

Lea assumed he knew what to expect when he arrived. A big heartfelt gushy reunion in the front hall, Kairi sniffling but never admitting she was crying, Sora grinning so wide his face couldn’t contain it, Riku giving a faint but approving nod, Terra awkwardly off to the side, Aqua studious and master-ly, and Ven rejoining them. They’d split off into two groups of three with Lea as the seventh wheel.

He wasn’t disappointed when he found the front hall empty save the busts and the décor. He wasn’t. Just, surprised, is all. Definitely just surprised.

Ven led him up the stairs. A room had been prepared for him, Ven said, up on the same hall as the Islanders’ room.

Aqua passed them in a hall, arms full of books, which she promptly abandoned on a side table when she saw him.

“Lea!” she said, smiling dazzlingly at him. He didn’t realize she was going to hug him until she did, her arms folded around him in an embrace that was somehow professional but genuinely warm. He gave her a lopsided a grin. “It’s great to see you.” She looked him over, and he caught a brief flick of her eyes to Ven in question.

Ven grinned. “I’m moving him into his room,” he said.

“Even better,” she said with a beaming smile. She followed them to Lea’s room, watching hopefully, expectantly, when he stepped inside. He was glad that Ven and Aqua stayed in the doorway—walking into the room had stolen his breath like a sucker punch.

Lea had assumed he knew what to expect. But he’d never expected it to feel like stepping into his house in Radiant Garden.

The bookcases were strewn with untidily stacked titles he remembered stealing—borrowing!—from the city library. The tops were covered in little odds and ends: stray buttons torn from his shirts in fits of pique or torn off by bushes and salvaged for later repair; a perfectly circular stone he’d found in the gardens with Isa right before getting caught and marched out by the guards; the ancient battered devil-faced discs he’d insisted were viable weapons, thank you very much.

A small closet on the far wall was hung with clothing in bright, vibrant colors that were all sized to fit him. There was a scarf hanging on the bedpost nearest him, replicated with frightening accuracy to that hideous monstrosity he’d worn so many years ago. He picked it up, feeling the fabric with his fingers. It had been a gift, that scarf. Isa had gotten it for him, muttering _It reminded me of you_ and _It’s just as tasteless as you are_ so quietly Lea almost hadn’t heard him.

“How,” he started, then stopped just as quickly. He looked back toward Aqua.

“The castle knows,” she said, understanding. It was cryptic, but kind. Her expression had gone soft with concern and something like empathy. He wondered, idly, what the castle had made for her. “It’s... powerful, that way.”

He nodded, twining the scarf around his hands, then chuckled idly, uncomfortable. He scratched at his face, the short bristly red hairs there scraping his fingers. “Well I guess I should uh.” He shrugged. “Clean up some.”

Aqua smiled. “Sure. Shower’s down the hall, on the left.”

Ven flashed him a grin that was painfully reminiscent of someone else and tucked his hands in his pockets. “I’ll round up the others! I know they’ll be glad to see you.”

He tried not to take _too_ long, but the feeling of properly hot water that wasn’t sharp and heavy with minerals and didn’t leave a grimy residue on his skin was like something out of a dream. Shaving and styling his hair properly, rather than letting it dry into jagged, curling spines, made him feel reborn in a way vastly unlike waking up groggy and sore on the floor of the old lab.

Putting on clothes that weren’t thin black layers under his heavy leather coat felt... Well, it felt like shedding an old, crusted skin, shucking it off like a snake to reveal shiny new scales underneath, vibrant and lively and _real_.

He hung the coat in the closet—he’d need it eventually, to travel—and chucked the pants and shirt into a dark corner where they were out of sight. Part of him thought he’d wash them later, but another louder part thought he might take them onto a balcony somewhere and burn them. That sounded nice. Like closure, or something.

He tied the scarf around his neck and let his hand linger on it, running his fingers over the dip where it curled, languid, around his neck, almost covering his chin.

He growled at himself and stepped outside, out into the hall. He’d only barely gotten his door shut when he was tackled bodily by a brown blur of pure energy.

He reacted without thinking, planting a foot and twisting before his assailant could grab him.

Sora’s yelp of surprise was incomprehensibly delighted, even after he hit the floor with a solid _thump_ of impact.

Lea blinked, frozen with his fingers still flared after he’d let go of Sora’s coat.

“Shit,” he said, thumping the heel of his hand to his forehead. Before he could go to scoop Sora off the floor, a hand lightly patted his shoulder.

“Hey, Lea.” Riku smirked faintly at him when he turned—this time more sedately—to look. “All moved in okay?”

Lea almost expected Riku to say something about his jumpiness, but there was something about his smile like he understood.

“Didn’t really have much to move,” Lea said. “So, yeah, I guess so?”

Sora sprang up to his feet like he was made of air. Which Lea still wasn’t entirely convinced wasn’t the case. Sora was sunshine and seaside breezes, sand and warmth. Always had been.

It made his chest hurt, standing in arm’s length like this.

“Makes sense,” Riku said, as Sora bounded closer.

“Hey Axel!” Sora said, ignoring the way Riku’s lips pursed and the way Lea frowned, irritated.

“It’s Lea,” he reminded Sora. “Got it memorized?”

Sora propped his fists on his hips and leaned in, tsking. He smelled like ice cream sticks and sunshine and Lea’s heart tripped, stalled, restarted with effort.

“I did! I did have it memorized! And then you changed it!”

Lea laughed, if only because it made the empty hollowness in his body lessen a little. “Well get with the times, Sora! New me, new name!”

Sora pouted magnificently. “More like new you _old_ name,” he groused.

Kairi met them at dinner and clucked over the deep shadows under his eyes, hugging him tight. “You’re family,” she said. He knew she didn’t remember him, not from back then, but it made him feel better hearing her say it like she did. She touched his scarf, frowning, as if caught in some thought she couldn’t put words to. Then she shook her head, brushing it aside, and grinned at him.

Dinner was a strangely calm affair. Lea joked about the lack of fanfare and fireworks, but he realized, even as the others were laughing at his feigned indignation, that he liked it. It felt like he had arrived not as a prodigal son, but as something... ordinary. Expected. He thought that he would feel unimportant, but instead, he felt welcomed. Like his moving into the castle wasn’t something so surprising that it deserved being made into a big deal. It was natural that he would move in. Because he belonged here with them.

He wasn’t moving in, he was coming home.

At least, that’s what it felt like at first.

That night he curled up in this unfamiliar, achingly comfortable bed, and dreamed.

The details were fuzzy. The dream blurred at the edges, like a shadowy vignette. He was on one knee, keyblade raised to ward off a blow that should have wrecked him four feet into the floor.

Saïx was on the other side, his Claymore scraping, grating where it ground against the edge of Lea’s blade.

“Stop this,” Lea said. God, he remembered this. “Stop, Isa. Please.”

Anger flashed in those cold, golden eyes.

“How _dare_ you speak that name to me,” Saïx snarled, his eyes glowing, gold spreading until his eyes were all gold without a fleck of white or black in them. His teeth turned sharp and vicious, his ears flared outward, wild, his hair a tangled flyaway mess.

Lea had seen Saïx enraged before, of course. He’d seen Isa when the boy had gone into a well-deserved fit of impotent teenaged anger.

But he’d never been on the receiving end before. He’d never been the _target_.

Saïx cast aside the Claymore with a vicious twist and yank, and in that moment, dream and memory diverged in a sharp tearing and rending of events like cloth. In reality, Saïx had thrown aside the blade and Lea had struck him down with spell and keyblade. A vicious, but short exchange, and Saïx was on the ground. Weak. Defeated.

In the dream, however.

Saïx’s Claymore hit the hard stone floor with a crash. Lea’s keyblade clattered beside it, a tinny echo of the much larger weapon.

“Isa,” Lea said. Prayed, maybe.

Saïx launched at him, claws ripping at the air, fangs bared. Saïx hit his slender, frail body with all the force of a raging bull and they slammed to the ground, Lea crying out in pain as his head smacked the stone and something in his body, a rib maybe, cracked and threatened to break clean through. Claws ripped into his guts, tearing at the fabric of his coat to the slick blood underneath, red welling up and staining both the lining of Lea’s long coat and Saïx’s fingers.

Saïx’s fangs found skin. He dug in deep and tore, tongue laving, lips suctioned to Lea’s flesh to pull and drink. Saïx shook his head like a dog with a toy, shredding the side of Lea’s neck and exposing meat and sinew and so much blood.

Lea’s vision was going dark. He could feel, distantly, somewhere very far away, the sluggish pulse of blood flooding Saïx’s mouth and the hollow of his throat and his hood and pooling on the stone floor.

He was bleeding, he was _dying_...

“Hey.”

Lea opened his eyes, then slammed them shut again. Starlight angling in through the window in his room was blindingly bright after the blackness of near-death and empty dreaming.

Riku sat carefully on the edge of Lea’s bed, turned to look at him.

“You okay?”

Lea gulped in great shuddering breaths and touched the side of his neck. Dry skin. No blood.

“Point taken,” Riku said, and Lea pressed a hand over his eyes until the pale disc-like echo images of his own irises glowed in the darkness of his vision.

“Fuck,” Lea said lowly.

“Mm,” Riku said.

Tension and raw, skittering energy poured into the holes left in him by the dreamed near-death experience. His skin itched.

“Hey,” Lea muttered. He glanced toward Riku, and he forgot what he was going to say. In the shadow of his dream and the dimness of the room and the soft starlight, as if by magic there was a different long-haired boy sitting on his bed. It was like no time had passed. Like they were still children. Cool eyes regarded him with an amused half-smile, the corner of his mouth turned up slightly, one eyebrow delicately arching in understated interest.

The scar was gone. Not healed, simply not yet made. God, he was so young.

“Isa—“ Lea stopped himself, closed his eyes. When he opened them, Riku was watching him. He seemed sort of... sad.

“Riku.”

“Yeah,” Riku said, and if Lea hadn’t known better he’d have thought Riku almost sounded regretful, like he felt bad that he was himself and not someone else.

Lea’s chest hurt.

“Are there, y’know, rules around here?”

“Hm,” Riku said. “Like what?”

“Like, I dunno, ‘don’t go outside after dark’ or something.”

Riku shrugged. “Sora, Kairi and I patrol after dark. It’s okay, just don’t roam too far? Or, at least tell someone you’re heading out, so we know when to go looking for you if something happens. The forests are a little dangerous in the middle of the night.” Fear prickled at Lea’s neck. Riku seemed to notice, because he waved a hand. “Just, that it’s dark. Holes, roots to trip over. Y’know.”

“Oh,” Lea said, exhaling it as an audible sound. “Right, sure.”

“This isn’t meant to be a cage,” Riku said gently.

“I need some air,” Lea said, and set a hand on Riku’s head with faux solemnity. “So consider this me telling you I’m going outside.”

Riku smirked, but just nodded and left the room, leaving Lea’s door open for him.

The castle walls, it seemed, were better insulated than Lea would have expected. Outside it was wickedly cold, chill winds biting into every inch of his exposed skin. He almost turned back to fetch his coat, but the halls felt so stifling and close that he didn’t want to go back in. He forged ahead into the bitter cold, shoving his hands as deep into his pockets as they’d go and ducking his face into the whorls of his scarf until his nose only poked out over the edges of the fabric.

Despite the cold, the grounds were beautiful. The occasional lamp lit the training yard and the walkways with soft golden nimbuses. He skirted them, feeling irrationally that if someone saw him silhouetted by the light he would be attacked. The grass swayed in a slight breeze, the branches of trees dancing in languid dips and rises.

As he got close to the forest’s edge he heard a rustling in the brush and skittered back several steps, yanking his hands free to fight. A doe bounded by, her body bobbing as she loped along. Lea struggled to wrangle his heartbeat to a more reasonable level. He felt incredibly stupid.

The night sky stretched overhead, the stars vibrant and impossibly bright, seeming simultaneously distant and just within reach. The moment of panic and pounding heart faded out of his immediate thoughts, and sliding into the gap was the hollowness that had ruled his life for the last few months.

He kept the forest on his right, boots falling heavily into the tall grass. He felt, for a moment, as though people walked alongside him. A blonde boy on his right, a pale young woman on his left.

It took effort not to check for his friends. “They aren’t there,” he whispered to himself. They were never there.

“I’ll always be there to bring you back,” he hissed into the night, pitching his voice high and coarse, mocking himself. “Fat lot of good _you_ are.”

The trees fell away on his right and before him was a lake, deep and vast and stretching so far ahead of him that he couldn’t see the opposite bank. The water shimmered, glittered, a pool of black trapping the white pinpricks of starlight.

The sight was uncomfortably like a teeming, rolling mass of Heartless grasping and quarrelling over hearts.

There was a pier on this side, he noticed, and he walked onto it, the boards thudding dully under every fall of his boots, the wood creaking in a wind that bit at him and tugged at his scarf.

He sat on the end of the pier and his boots sparked ripples in the surface of the lake with soft, muted splashes. The wood was cold under his jeans.

 _Get in the water_ , said a part of him. The part that was still fire and brimstone, 2 a.m. tattoos and liquor mixed with pills. The part that had laughed when Isa wrinkled his nose, that cheered when Isa kicked in doors.

_Get in, you know you want to._

He did, even though there was a part of him, a small part, that was making aborted “um, _um_ ” noises deep inside and said it was a bad plan.

 _Get in_ , said the part of his brain that had never had a good plan since the day he was born. Or, frankly, since the day he’d died.

He stood up again, watching the surface of the lake as he cautiously stripped, gathering his clothing into a small pile on the pier that he weighted down with his boots. The air was wicked, biting cold. He stood there for a moment that stretched out forever, staring at the water, stripped down to his underwear. His bullshit vampire-like skin nearly glowed in the moonlight, pale as bone, pebbled with the cold, all his hair standing on end.

In a small, strange way, the cold felt far-off. His body felt it, of course, but his mind had put it aside, focusing instead on the hollow empty hole in his chest where something—no, someone—was supposed to be.

He leapt into the lake before he could think better of it.

Cold. Ice cold, like death, like fear, like hate. He sank, his body freezing so fast and hard that he couldn’t bring himself to move, to beat for the surface and just _move_. His arms were locked, his legs cramping with the horrible, deathly cold.

He lost track of time, willing his body to move, his arms to reach for the surface. He moved sluggish, slow, fingers stretching upward. He could see the moon beyond the surface of the lake, flickering and surreal and alien.

Something scooped him up out of the water, something that touched him without making physical contact and plucked him out of the lake like a giant claw machine.

His body slammed into the pier and he gagged, choking out water, coughing horribly. His lungs _burned_ now that the frigid air was flooding into them. His body shuddered, convulsed on racking shivers as the sub-conscious part of his mind tried desperately to restore function. Magic flared to life just behind his naked back. Heat, blessed heat washing over him, drying ice-water droplets on his skin so fast they turned to steam, hissing off his body.

Lea looked up and the face of a dead, shattered crystalline girl glared back at him. Her black hair stringy, limp, like thread playing at being real hair; her eyes, her _eyes_ so blue they were like marbles or buttons, fiery with rage.

A name brushed over his tongue like he almost remembered, but then it was gone.

Kairi punched him across the cheek and he hit the pier for a second time.

” _Ow_ ,” he groaned. She made a high, exasperated noise oddly like the noise a kettle made just before it whistled.

“You!” she shouted. “You _idiot!_ ”

He was still shivering but the heat of her magic was helping, soaking bone-deep until he could slowly stop vibrating in place like a discarded phone.

“What the _hell_ were you thinking?” she continued. “You are damn lucky Riku mentioned you’d gone out! What if none of us came looking for you?”

He blinked. In the distance he could hear voices calling to each other. Kairi looked over her shoulder, red hair swinging as she whirled. She cupped her hands and yelled through them.

“ _Guys! I found him!_ ”

His teeth chattered so hard he almost couldn’t speak.

“H-h-how long have I b-b-been g-gone,” he said, sounding more like a chittery squirrel than a man.

“Hours, you great stupid _jerk_ ,” she snapped.

“S-s-s-sorry,” he said.

Something in her cracked, broke, the rage dropping away like an unfastened cape. She hit her knees and folded her arms around his shoulders, pulling him against her chest. She wasn’t warm, exactly, her clothes were cold from the wind, but he let her hold him and just shivered in her arms.

“You ass,” she whispered. “I was so worried.”

She was cold, her magic hot against his back, but for a moment, just a moment, the hollowness eased. He felt less empty. He felt...

He felt okay.

Guilt curled in his gut as soon as he’d put words to it. It felt like taking something that wasn’t his to fill a gap left by someone who should have been irreplaceable. It felt like he was cheating on a loved one, even though he couldn’t remember her name.

Behind her appeared her boys. Thankfully, they said nothing. But Sora looked at Lea with soft, sad eyes and for a moment, just a moment, he looked like someone else. It ached.

They wrapped him in his dry clothes and Riku’s coat and half-escorted, half-carried him back to the castle.

 

“You’re lucky you didn’t lose any fingers,” Aqua said professionally, the next morning, as she applied a few Cure spells and some precisely-placed Fires. “Or toes,” she added.

“Bedside manner not your forte, huh?” he muttered.

She poked him in the chest and he hissed when pain curled around the spot. He felt over-sensitive still, tender, his skin bright red as if the cold water had burned him.

“Watch yourself, Apprentice,” she muttered.

That, at least, made him feel sort of good. The title made him feel important and included. He liked that.

“Yes, Master,” he intoned, giving her a cheeky little smile that made her glance at him, roll her eyes, and then return her attention to her work.

“No more night swims,” she said as she finished and sat back, dusting off her hands and stretching her fingers, working out the kinks left from heavy magic use. “Though I’m sure Kairi saw to that.”

He rubbed his sore cheek. It hadn’t bruised, but that was a near thing. “You could say that, yeah.”

Aqua nodded. “Good. She was worried about you.” She took his hands, now that she was finished, and turned them over, running fingers across his forearms like she was looking for something.

“Do you have a history of...” She stopped, as if she’d thought better of the question.

He had a sneaky suspicion he knew what she was going to ask.

“No,” he said, adding as an afterthought, “Master.”

She glanced to his face, reading his expression. Scanning his eyes. He wondered if she would know if he was lying.

He wondered if he _was_. Did it count as self-destructive tendencies if you hadn’t _actually_ known that the castle you were sneaking into was Actually-For-Real-Dangerous rather than just Possibly-Bad-For-Your-Criminal-Record-Dangerous? Did it count if a steely boy with silver-blue hair had always talked you out of the _really_ scary stuff before you could really resolve to do it?

“Alright,” she said, satisfied. She gently squeezed his hands, the doctor-master replaced abruptly by the woman he shared a home with, a friend. “Good.”

 

No one treated him differently after what he rapidly began thinking of as The Lake Incident. No one chastised him, at least after Kairi had laid into him. No one yelled at him. No one said they were disappointed. No one imposed rules or restrictions. No one looked at him when they thought he wasn’t looking. No one treated him with pity and kid gloves.

In a way, that was worse.

He filled his days with training, sparring Sora and Riku and struggling, with Kairi looking over his shoulder, to cast anything that _wasn’t_ fire. He swore and sweated and bruised and tried to coax anything out of his soul but the nitrous heat in his blood.

They soothed the ache. Silver hair and warm smiles and soft blue eyes all blurred together and patched the cracked plaster of his heart, shoring up the weakened walls with new struts.

It felt illicit. It felt like an affair. Cheating on the dead with the living.

But god help him, they made him feel better. Whole.

He grew stronger, with their help. Emotionally, physically.

Still, sometimes, when he was tired—when his heart was heavy and his head full of cotton, he dreamed.

Though he really wished he didn’t.

The corridors In Between yawned around him like the maw of some great beast, stretching impossibly in every direction. He was on his back. Staring upward into something that looked no different from every other path. What way was up? Was he on the ground, or the ceiling? The walls?

He didn’t know.

Sora sat next to him.

He remembered this. God, he _remembered_ this.

He almost remembered what he’d said. He’d said something about Roxas. Something...

Sora broke pattern. Sora lurched at him. Fingers curling around Axel’s throat. He was already fading but Sora’s fingers were tight, crushing into his windpipe until Axel rasped and wheezed.

He didn’t have the strength to pull at Sora’s hands. He couldn’t fight. He was dying, twice over.

“Rox...as...” he wheezed.

Sora shook him by the throat. His blue eyes were hard. Foreign. Not Sora’s at all.

“You bastard,” Sora snarled, in a voice that was his, but not his at the same time. There was something layered in it. No—there were three layers. Sora, and underneath, the voice that had laughed at him, that had thrown popsicle sticks at him. And underneath that, something dark and hideous and hungry.

“You _bastard._ How dare you die without saying goodbye!”

Axel couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Choking gurgles and aborted half-words tangled up in the back of his throat, getting stuck under the pressure of Sora’s fingers. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t _see_ and maybe that was worse than endless blue and the afterimage afterthoughts of dancing Nobodies...

“Shh,” Sora whispered, soothing, despite the fact that the boy was choking him.

“Shh,” said another voice.

Lea realized, with a jarring, horrible, painful inhale, that he was awake. Sora was sitting next to him on his bed, against the wall, with his knees tucked up against his chest. Ven sat on Lea’s other side, on the edge of the bed, with his legs crossed under him.

“Uh,” Lea said, all eloquence. His throat felt like he’d been chewing on cotton balls and he licked his lips, clearing it with a faint cough. “Hey, guys.”

Sora looked uncomfortable. Ven looked pensive.

“Hey,” they said, in almost perfect unison. It was eerie. Neither of them acknowledged it, which was eerier still.

For a moment they floated in the in-between vacuum of a dead conversation. Lea blinked up at the ceiling and focused on his breath, inhaling deep and exhaling slow.

“Lea?” Ven asked.

“Yeah,” Lea said, and looked down at him.

“We’re right here.”

The statement was nonsensical. Lea opened his mouth to say so, but Sora took Lea’s hand and squeezed gently.

“Do you understand?” Sora asked.

“Maybe,” Lea said. Pain curled around his throat like a noose. “I-I dunno. Maybe.”

Ven smiled and pushed hair away from Lea’s eyes.

“Hey, don’t forget.”

Sora and Lea both looked at him.

Ven grinned shyly and shrugged a little. “As long as we remember someone, they live forever.”

Sora put a hand to his chest, as if it hurt. Ven mirrored the motion. They bowed their heads. Mourning. A moment of silence for a reality that no longer existed.

Maybe he really did understand. Lea’s chest was tight. Sharp, like little spines were being pressed into his skin. Needles of ideas.

He wasn’t _replacing_ anyone. No one was ever exactly like someone else, after all. And if he knew Roxas, which he did... well. Roxas would’ve smacked him up the back of the head by now if he knew Lea was doing this to himself.

He wasn’t alone. And he remembered. And maybe that was all that mattered.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse and low, but he smiled. “I got it memorized.”

**Author's Note:**

> okay so remember when I said "I'm done unless I come up an idea for one more character"
> 
> this is the one I meant THIS TIME I'M DONE FOR REAL I SWEAR
> 
> This one is definitely the most narrative-focused and story-like, with less introspection? I'm not sure if it works as well as the others. Maybe it works better BECAUSE it's more open to interpretation? I dunno. EITHER WAY I hope you enjoyed it, and you all have my sincere and immense gratitude for your devotion and attention and support. Y'all are so good. Stay awesome.


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